Unusual Channels: how MPs can influence the spending review
4 min read
In her occasional series on Parliament’s inner workings, Hannah White explores how a new Liaison Committee initiative will provide MPs with a rare opportunity to scrutinise future government spending plans
The conclusions of one of the most extensive and consequential processes that ever occurs in government will emerge into the light on 11 June this year. Yet parliamentarians will have remarkably little formal opportunity to scrutinise or influence those conclusions – the hugely important spending plans that will be set out in the government’s first three-year comprehensive spending review (CSR).
President Trump’s latest demands for increased Nato defence spending put a spotlight on the UK Parliament’s spending scrutiny deficit. Questions about how the government should prioritise military expenditure in comparison with other priorities – such as welfare, health or education – and about the timetable for increased defence spending have been raised in the media. And yet, though these questions will no doubt be raised in parliamentary questions and in back bench debates, there is no formal process for MPs to have a say.
The Commons is adequately equipped when it comes to retrospective scrutiny of how government spends taxpayers’ money – with the weight of the National Audit Office powering the influential Public Accounts Committee and a suite of select committees tasked with looking into departmental expenditure. By comparison there is very little opportunity for MPs to analyse and influence government’s future spending plans.
The UK is an international outlier in giving its elected representatives so little opportunity to scrutinise spending
The spending review process contrasts sharply with the government’s other big set-piece financial decision making process: the Budget. Scrutiny of the Finance Bill, which is required to put the Budget into effect, enables MPs to examine the government’s tax plans in some detail largely before they are put into effect, but there is no legislation – and hence no legislative scrutiny – involved in a spending review. MPs must content themselves with a measly three days a session when they are allowed to debate the ‘estimates’ – a few individual departmental budgets – a process largely disconnected from the spending review itself.
For back benchers it is difficult to understand how to influence a spending review. The back bench experience of Darren Jones – now Chief Secretary to the Treasury, the minister responsible for orchestrating the CSR – is unlikely to be unusual. Jones told a recent Institute for Government (IfG) event that “no one actually told me what the spending review process was, or how to intervene or lobby on it effectively”, and he now suspected that the interventions of the Business and Trade Select Committee he chaired often came too late to influence ministerial decision making.
That is why a new initiative from the Liaison Committee – the committee made up of all the Commons committee chairs – is welcome. Taking advantage of the first multi-year spending review for many years to take place on a slow enough timetable to allow for scrutiny, the senior back benchers are encouraging select committees to request access to their respective departments’ spending review submissions. Even if influencing the CSR will remain challenging – with prioritisation decisions being made in departments by the end of February – this information will help committees understand the implications for their departments of spending decisions lasting (in theory) for at least the next three years.
The UK is an international outlier in giving its elected representatives so little opportunity to scrutinise spending. In lieu of structural proposals – such as the Procedure Committee’s 2019 recommendation of a budget committee and the IfG’s proposal for an expenditure committee – the Liaison Committee’s initiative is a positive development. But its impact will depend on the appetite and alacrity with which ministers respond to committees’ requests – and the seriousness with which back benchers take their scrutiny role.
Hannah White is director of the Institute for Government
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